The Graduate (1967)

USA, 106 minutes

Director: Mike Nichols

Writers: Calder Willingham, Buck Henry, Charles Webb

Photography: Robert Surtees

Music: Simon & Garfunkel

Editor: Sam O'Steen

Cast: Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, Katharine Ross, William Daniels, Murray Hamilton, Buck Henry, Norman Fell, Alice Ghostley, Richard Dreyfuss, Mike Farrell, Elaine May

The Graduate was a hit movie everyone conspired to designate a symbol of its unique times, released at Christmas following the Summer of Love and heading into 1968. But for a movie that appeared to have a lot of "relevance," that prized quality of the '60s, The Graduate makes a lot of basic mistakes. It casts Dustin Hoffman as a California kid but he barely has a speck of California in him. Vietnam and a civil rights struggle do not exist in this movie, though the sexual revolution is covered quite adequately (a religious relative of mine, in California no less, once turned off the TV in outrage because this movie was playing). And the basic premise—a young man falls in love with the daughter of the married woman who gives him his sexual awakening—is fairly distasteful when looked at it in isolation, like some inverted, degraded version of a classical Greek drama. It's not tragic, it's tawdry.

But I'm not sure these filmmakers, notably director Mike Nichols, really made mistakes because, after all, it's a comedy they set out to make here. It's absurd like comedy in fundamental ways. Benjamin Braddock (Hoffman) may be going through coming-of-age rites of passage but he never seems to learn the first name of his paramour (Anne Bancroft), calling her "Mrs. Robinson" right through to the end, even when they are in bed together. His parents' idea of a gift for his 21st birthday is a scuba diving outfit ... to use in the swimming pool. And Ben is not even capable of getting a room at a hotel without going through ridiculous slapstick-level gyrations. His luggage is in the car but he doesn't need a porter. It's only a toothbrush. My guess is it's primarily the Simon & Garfunkel soundtrack that confuses people.

The Graduate (1967)

#22: The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967)

Picking up where Phil recently left Benjamin Braddock to his scuba gear, I have been living with The Graduate one way or another for most of my life—sometimes taking it as straight-up farce, sometimes as sophisticated and urbane, sometimes as statement for a generation, sometimes not connecting with it at all ("too clever, too patronizing, and ultimately too glib to be taken seriously," as Phil interprets it), sometimes wanting to jump up and down with the pure joy of its accomplishment. In short, it seems to work for me like the old saw about not being able to step in the same river twice. It's always different from the way I remember it, there's almost always something I hadn't noticed before, and watching it again is never the same experience twice.

Mostly it's a comedy of manners, a spoof on the shallow values of the conformist/materialist '50s colliding with the self-conscious, only vaguely hip sexual liberation of the post-birth-control '60s. But even as it plays as a comedy—and as a comedy it sparkles—its center of gravity remains a black hole of dread, around which all the players are orbiting and into which they are all slowly, without exception, collapsing.